In many ways the field of information technology (IT) infrastructure management is mature. Many systems provide the ability to perform fault and performance management for the devices and interconnections, which make up the infrastructure that supports the applications that IT provides. More recently with the adoption of CMDB technology, complex infrastructures can be mapped as services. Measurements of the quality of the service delivery can also be monitored. Traffic flows can be monitored at the packet level, or exposed in the aggregate.
As the computing environment evolves with technologies such as virtualization, and the ability to provision machine images at will, a new style of computing has evolved. This new style exploits the elasticity of these infrastructures, along with orchestration to create wildly scalable applications that “pay as they go,” only provisioning the capacity needed at any point in time.
This style of computing, and indeed virtualization itself poses challenges to traditional IT management systems, which were designed at a time where infrastructures were fairly static, and large changes were adopted as part of planned migrations.
The state of the art in determining the infrastructure involved in providing services is that, potential hardware resources are discovered and polled. The information collected identifies what infrastructure resources were active and at what time. The information is be used to piece together the picture of how the infrastructure was behaving at any point in time. This conventional process requires intimate knowledge of the operations of the infrastructure, as well as some amount of hand-assembly to put the picture together.